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Snout the cobra, and how to frighten your parents

Snakes, leopards, lions and hyenas - and more mice - loom once more in the life of Christelle Randall as she continues her African adventures - and her determined campaign to scare the wits out of her poor old mum and dad.....

I am writing from the town of Tzaneen, about 80km away from our new reserve Karongowe, which lies close to the incredible Drakensberg mountains.

Karongowe is a much more commercial reserve compared with Venetia and we live in a big farmhouse as opposed to the tents we used before.

The Marieskop mountain lies right behind the house and at night its slopes burn with bush fires. From the house, it looks as if the mountain is adorned with fairy lights, like a Christmas tree.

There is no fence around the house so we are not allowed off the verandah at night although the only things that usually run through camp are hyenas and bush pigs. Lions and leopards are not usually seen around this area.

It was really sad saying goodbye to Venetia which I had grown to love.

Compared with Karongowe, the landscape was more rugged and the reserve itself much bigger. Karongowe is a third of the size at only 9,000 hectares.

As a result when out doing telemetry to find the animals we don't even need to triangulate or get compass bearings for the beeps.

Our main focus here at Karongowe is going to be leopards which is really exciting as I still haven't seen one.

They are so elusive that it's really hard to gauge how many are in the reserve and although there were leopards in Venetia, none were collared.

However our prime focus here is going to be rehabilitating a leopard called Shiluwane who has been housed in "boma" (quarantine) due to health problems. He is being released next week under our watch and we have to monitor him each day, and check how he is hunting and interacting with other animals.

None of us have high hopes for him to be honest as we recently found out there is a new resident male leopard known as Hercules who weighs 107kg.

Given that leopards kill any competition and Shiluwane is half his size with no front teeth, I don't fancy his chances. In order to track the leopards we will be doing night shifts so setting off at midnight and tracking till 6am, which I am really excited about.

It's funny to look back on the past few weeks and think how many hairy moments we have had. Back in Venetia one of my (now) favourite memories was when our 4x4 vehicle got stuck in the middle of a ditch after some serious off roading to find a lion called Mungo Jerrie.

The sun had just gone down and it was pitch black and I was sat on the back of the open vehicle on telemetry which meant I was tracking the lion. I had the machine pressed very close to my ear and the signal for Mungo got all the way down to minus 2 which meant he was close.

The teacher told me if the signal got down to minus 3 we were all getting out and climbing into the front cabin. I have never relied so closely on my hearing for survival or jumped at the sound of every rustling branch.

To top it all off, for a while the signal I was getting sounded stronger from in front but then realised it had been a back signal and actually the lion was potentially right behind me.

The signal luckily only came down to minus 2.75 but slightly worrying that we weren't moving and Mungo Jerrie was getting closer. Luckily we got rescued pretty quickly and I can now look back on the story with humour and allow my parents to read this without fear of being summoned back home....Also the fact we had a snout nosed cobra living so close to us on camp. By the end of the five weeks we had called him Snout.

But it's only after I went to a snake and reptile park this week that I realised quite how dangerous he really was. Had anyone of us been bitten then the chances were not very good! Calling him Snout, anthropomorphising him and turning him into a lovable cartoon character was possibly the only way to deal with it at the time.

We now have a resident croc living at the dam closest to the house, who again has been christened Cedric.

The snake and reptile park was pretty interesting and we watched black mamba snakes being fed three live mice.

As most people will know black mambas are one of the most venomous snakes in the world (on a par with Snout) and their venom can kill a human in 45 minutes. We watched as they nipped one of the mice and it fell dead within seconds.

I couldn't help but feel sorry for the mice even though the handler told us they had no idea there was any danger. I am not convinced the third mouse felt this way; he sat there trembling surrounded by the dead bodies of his two other mice friends, a little like the last victim in a horror movie, so pretty sure he knew something might be up.

I also held a 10ft python, which was pretty cool; they have beautiful skins. I also got roped into having a live scorpion run around my face and held a baboon spider (tarantula).

I have also had a day out to Kruger Park in the last week which was also good. We hired a car and toured ourselves round the southern end of the park.

It was quite satisfying to be able to rely on what we had learnt in the last five weeks and not a guide. We were able to find fresh rhino middens (rhino latrines - they defecate in the same areas and fresh middens is a good sign they are close by) and also look for fresh lion tracks.

Unfortunately we didn't see any big cats on our drive but we found hippos, crocs, elephants, hyenas, countless birds and about 90 per cent of the parks impala. At the start of my time at Venetia I liked calling out "stay alive" to all the herbivores in a bid to install them with positive thinking but these days it's usually just "die" in a bid to see something interesting...

We have also perfected some good hyena calls (there are plenty around camp at Karongowe) so took to trying to frighten the impala at Kruger, just to prove how mature we are without guides on board. My lion roar needs a little more work.

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Snout the cobra, and how to frighten your parents

Snakes, leopards, lions and hyenas - and more mice - loom once more in the life of Christelle Randall as she continues her African adventures - and her determined campaign to scare the wits out of her poor old mum and dad.....

I am writing from the town of Tzaneen, about 80km away from our new reserve Karongowe, which lies close to the incredible Drakensberg mountains.

Karongowe is a much more commercial reserve compared with Venetia and we live in a big farmhouse as opposed to the tents we used before.

The Marieskop mountain lies right behind the house and at night its slopes burn with bush fires. From the house, it looks as if the mountain is adorned with fairy lights, like a Christmas tree.

There is no fence around the house so we are not allowed off the verandah at night although the only things that usually run through camp are hyenas and bush pigs. Lions and leopards are not usually seen around this area.